With rapid advancement in fabrication of integrated circuits, the electronic technology makes continuous development and progress to urge a variety of electronic products toward digitization. Furthermore, the electronic products are designed to be compact, multi-function and high-speed such that the finished products are more portable and utility to meet the requirements of life. Particularly, since multimedia electronic products providing powerful arithmetical ability and easily processing digital information such as a variety of sounds, images and graphics, are preferred by consumers, image players are popularly developed and employed. Display screens are installed in personal digital assistants (PDAs), notebooks, discman, digital cameras or mobile phones etc. to facilitate browsing information or images.
On the other hand, with rapid advancement in the fabrication of thin film transistors, planar display devices such as liquid crystal displays (LCDs) and organic light emitting diode displays (OLEDs) whose performance is continuously enhanced are largely applied in various electronic products such as a Personal Digital Assistant (PDA) device, a notebook computer, a video camera and a mobile phone. Moreover, since the related manufacturers aggressively invest in research & development and employ large-scale fabricating equipment, the quality of the planar display devices is unceasingly improved and the price thereof is continuously decreased. This promptly broadens the application of the planar display devices.
In the fabrication of a display panel, a large quantities of TFTs, pixel electrodes and patterns of crisscrossing scan lines and data lines are fabricated on a glass substrate by thin film deposition and photolithography and etching processes to construct a desired pixel array. Moreover, related circuit patterns fabricated on the glass substrate in order to provide operation voltages and signals desired for the TFTs of each pixel element extend outward from the pixel array to connect with chips and components surrounding the glass substrate. In such a way, timing controller chips and source driver ICs fabricated at the outer edge of the glass substrate can transmit data signals to each of the pixel elements through the circuit patterns on the display panel. In addition, gate driver ICs fabricated at the side of the glass substrate can also transmit scan signals to each of the pixel elements through the circuit patterns on the display panel.
Since the glass substrate needs to be transferred back and forth between different machines in the whole fabricating process of the display panel, collisions and frictions frequently occurred in transportation of the glass substrate cause scrapes of the circuits on the glass substrate. Particularly, when the circuits are severely damaged to be broken, the desired electrical connections cannot be effectively provided. Refer to FIG. 1A, showing scrapes 101 of the circuits 10 on the panel suffering an improper external force. FIG. 1B shows shell-like fractures 102 of the circuits 10 on the panel due to the other undesired factors such as damages of the glass substrate.
In the current production of display panels, when the circuits of the glass substrate are severely damaged, the glass substrate is often discarded. However, this leads to great loss. Therefore, it is desired to find out a method to effectively repair the broken TFT circuits so as to reduce losses.